When Samuel Ha-Levi illegally built a synagogue in the provincial Spanish town of Toledo, no one could have known that it would one day become a church, then a military barracks in the Napoleonic war, a national monument, and finally a museum… but that’s just the beginning!
With the return of Jews to England in the 17th century, the developing community’s members surprisingly saw no need for a Jewish printing house. The first printed book was published decades later and only in the wake of a controversial internal dispute…
A trove of documents from Vienna’s Jewish community during the Anschluss period has been revealed to the public for the first time thanks to a collaboration between MyHeritage and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the National Library of Israel. The collection contains 228,250 records, including scanned original documents submitted by Jews hoping to emigrate from Vienna. These documents, available on the Library’s website, provide extraordinary insights into the life of Vienna’s thriving Jewish community in the years 1938–1939
Even on Yom Kippur, German Jews in the 19th century were ready to sacrifice themselves for their homeland
The long journey of a book of Leviticus that was hidden in a Vienna basement during the Nazi era, before eventually making its way to the National Library of Israel’s Conservation and Restoration Lab…
Walther Rathenau, one of Germany’s wealthiest and most powerful men, was gunned down by radicals in 1922 and mourned by millions. A moving and timeless letter from his mother was read at the murderer’s trial.
On a few occasions, the illustrious Rabbi Yosef Hayim of Baghdad cited a mysterious source whose name and work had never appeared anywhere else…
This long-forgotten Passover custom was dealt a bitter blow by a sharp wife in a 15th century Haggadah…
Hostage-taking and forced migration were just two methods used by Russian forces in Ukraine and Poland a century ago
The only known manuscript of The Chronicle of Pope Paul IV is at the National Library in Jerusalem…
